I think we are ready to call this meeting to order. It is 3.35, my apologies for the delay, and we are
here in the NatU Hill Room. It is Wednesday, September 3rd, and we have Commissioner Thomas, Commissioner
Madeira, and Surveyor Tron, and Wright Randolph, and we are ready to begin, I believe. So our first
agenda item,
is public input for items not on the agenda. Is there anyone here in the NatU Hill Room that would like
to provide public comment for matters not on the agenda? I see no takers. Anybody on Teams? Please raise
your hand, virtual hand. I see no one on Teams.
All right. Our next agenda item, please, is the approval of minutes for August 6, 2025. Move approval
of the minutes for August 6, 2025. Second. Any public comment on this matter? Here in the NatU Hill Room,
no one. And on Teams, I do not see anyone either.
All right, we can just do a unanimous. I'm sorry. We can do a voice vote. A voice vote, yes. Okay. The what?
Okay. Call it. Call for the vote, please. All those in favor of approving the minutes for August 6, 2025,
say aye. Aye. The minutes are approved.
Moving on to the stormwater expenditure report for July, 2025. We didn't have anything really big fleet
maintenance. We had 9,352 86 and then the oil and gas 5,013 75. Awesome. Thank you very much.
We are now on new business.
we have a stormwater management ordinance draft updates. So I will give a brief overview of the ordinance
updates and the reasoning for them. So just zoom in to the PDF just a few clicks. Thank you. So the
The version that you have been provided with is our red line version. So it shows the previous contents
that have been crossed out, as well as what is being added or modified within the existing ordinance.
So House Bill 1037 was enacted, which requires local authority
to be no more stringent than the IDEM, Indiana Department of Environmental Management, construction,
stormwater, general permit. So we have worked closely with our legal office to update our ordinance
so that it reflects exactly what's in the construction, stormwater, general permit. Excellent.
Thank you so much. And we
are required to take action to approve or deny that ordinance. And so I would like to turn to my colleagues
to see if they have any comments. So one of the first questions I had was whether the drainage board
had reviewed these. And the answer was yes. Mr. Schilling, is there anything you can add to the information
about these changes?
The statute was adopted that basically says you can't go beyond what is required in the construction
general stormwater permit. And that permit is limited in scope to areas that involve one acre more of
land disturbing activity or less than an acre of land disturbing activity in a basically means a subdivision
or any PUD or any type of develop more than one lot. And so we went through and just basically tried
to make sure that everything that we had adopted applied to
The one acre less than one acre common plan requirement with the exception of the illicit discharge.
I think that that's Not subject to that limitation You see but the the construction general
permit incorporates a
the county's standards and so forth in several places. And so we kept the standards that we had in there.
We just wanted to make sure the situations that were authorized to apply them to. I don't think I'm
going to say anything different. I don't have additional questions. I might just summarize what you
said a little more
simplified even though this is a very complex situation as the state enacted certain restrictions and
what we did is modified the ordinance to identify everything we're allowed to do and we kept those in
there and also in conjunction with planning we've also shipped other things where planning has the ability
to have those in their ordinance that is still
you know, allowed kind of from a state standpoint, from some of these legislation changes that we are
encountering. And we've had an open discussion a while back about this, and this is just the end result, so.
And I hope I said that pretty, I was trying to simplify it, so, okay. We are still able, without much,
as guidance to require that any lot development has to keep the sediment and the dust on site. So that's
still in our code. But other than that. It's a situation where the state's dictating something to everyone
across the state.
And it doesn't fit us locally at all, but we have to comply. And it's terrible because we all pay the price,
all of us down the road with future problems and runoff and other issues that may result. So I think
you made the best of a bad situation. Yep. And I fear that what we talked about before is that they're
going to make these standards uniform and then sort of gut them.
I hope that does not happen. I did see that we have several references in the ordinances, I'm sorry,
in the sections that were changed to general references. These regulations shall not be interpreted
or applied to impose restrictions or obligations in excess of those set forth or incorporated into the
IDEM constructions or motor journal permit. So we're covered should anything change there.
I don't have any further comments or questions. Any other? Any public comments here in the NatU Hill Room?
Any comments online? Seeing none, I would like to call for a voice vote.
We have to have a motion first. I'm going to go ahead and move that we approve the stormwater management
ordinance draft updates. Second. Now we can get the vote. Yes. All those in favor of adopting the stormwater
management ordinance draft updates say aye. Motion passes. I would make one note. Erica has advised us that
The state is looking into the new permit requirements starting next year. And so some of these things
hopefully can be cleared up or resolved through that process. Thanks. We actually have two county surveyors
on the steering committee, the stormwater steering committee, one as our president of the affiliate
and another one as a certified engineer.
Just want to make sure people are aware that we have a direct line to some of the folks that will be
on the steering committee. And I've expressed some of the concerns as far as the lay of the land here
versus up north. And, you know, hopefully we can make sure the legislators are aware that everything
isn't flat in Indiana and certain measures are important to have in place. So I'll leave it there.
That's one of those negative aspects of the one size fits all approach. Yes. The next agenda item under
new business is the stormwater budget update. I didn't see that on my agenda. Sorry about that.
So we had budget hearings our first round, I guess you would call.
of budget hearings last week. So I represent the stormwater budget, the MVH budget, among other budgets
within the department. We had proposed some changes to our motor vehicle highway budget of moving some
of the employees into the county general. That was removed from the county general. When they got to
the stormwater budget, it was mentioned by the council.
for me to go back and look on utilizing all the budgets within my department and if any could be used
to help with the personnel issue, trying to sustain an MVH budget and reaching out to other budgets
and utilizing them. Since the creation of Stormwater in 2012, it's always been kind of housed by itself.
All the equipment,
Everything is housed at the Monroe County Highway Facility. All the utilities, all the building maintenance,
everything is paid out of that MVH for stormwater. Also, a lot of the administration, I oversee the
stormwater. I oversee the crews out at the garage on a daily basis amongst with superintendent.
There's engineering assistance from our county engineer for the crews. They reach out.
also on some of the stormwater projects such as Stip Road, Marlin Hills, Redbud. Those, according to
our engineer, he reviewed all of those plans as part of his duties. So I had proposed to you all,
I had sent an email of moving a portion of those salaries into the stormwater budget.
just a percentage with their benefits. One, to retain all of our employees in the county highway department,
whether it be Stormwater, Cune Bridge, or MVH. Things have changed a lot with the MVH budget.
The distributions on the MVH budget will decrease. You can reach out to LTAP, as I stated in the email,
those will go down. The only thing that hurts is our paving.
When we pay more for our overhead and employees and insurance costs and fuel costs going up, that decreases
our paving. We work our crews together. They used to be pretty separated. Now we do it together.
which is basically drainage. So back in the day, I know when Terry Quillman was here, he wanted to take
over all the ditching for the county, realized that it wasn't possible and not doable. You had to have
the help with the two crews to get it done and make a difference in this county. So the stormwater purchased
their own gradle. So it's worked really well with having the crews together in one location.
So that's why we proposed the idea of doing a percentage of three positions, the director, superintendent
and engineer out of a portion of the stormwater budget. And I would reach out to Dave on chapter 766.
I've looked at chapter 766. I don't see a lot of restriction there that it can't be done. I know we
pay a quarter of the salary for the surveyor position,
out of the stormwater budget. And then our crews, our admin staff, and all the employees out of that budget.
I'm not trying to cushion any other budgets. I'm just trying to make it all work. Our crews work great
together, and I want to keep it that way. I want to maintain what we've built and do it to where we
can keep all of our employees and work together.
So, but again, it's your, I just proposed this to the board. It was recommended to me from the County
Council and I wanted to bring it to you so you can have that discussion and it is ultimately your decision.
I'd like to ask my colleagues if they have any comments, questions. Go ahead. Yeah, I was actually kind
of wanting to go last,
One, I want to make a very stern comment of the fact that if there's contributions being made in the
effort to support stormwater, I'm not against making sure that they're compensated for that. But also,
I want to see way more detail, way more information
What was circulated was 50%. Then it was then mentioned that maybe 25 to 30%. I reviewed the council
budget hearing and they did ask Director Ridge to kind of look at all of the funds. They didn't single
out stormwater. Stormwater went first, kind of went up and down and then they went into the other budget
discussions.
it is true they said look at everything so you know that's what she did. I also want to address the
25% of my salary. I think there's a I want to make a distinguished point here as I serve on the board
and I feel like all the time and contribution other members of the board like the
county commissioners, if they wanted to kind of shift some of their percentage into the fund,
I think that's more of a comparable analogy because we all know that there could be one item and there's
immense amount of time that I will dive into these different topics. I'll also talk about my commitments
to attending and being a member of the MS4 partnership, the INASM, the Indiana Association of Flip Plane
and Stormwater Management.
the Indiana Lake Management Society, the LTAP Stormwater Conference. I put an abundance of time and
effort to make sure that I'm educated and well-versed in these. I also do webinars from Christopher
Burke that actually, if I was certified, would go to my continuing education to be certified.
I do all of these things, also my office,
has a huge contribution to these efforts as well. So, you know, I would be happy to kind of create a
presentation because that's going to be my request today is that we move this conversation to another
date that the speed of this makes me very uncomfortable.
to try to make a decision. I think we need to kind of see these breakdowns of how these time efforts
and costs are absorbed because I don't even know what 25% would look like unless I just kind of did
the rough math of what the 50% looked like, which was a 220 plus thousand. I want to say 223.
Let's just kind of round it up to 225,000 annually. 23,422. Yeah.
as an annual fixed cost with potential cost of living adjustments and everything else. Like I said,
I'm totally amenable to discuss this, make sure that we have like a forecast. I don't want to be in
a position that unfortunately Director Rich is in right now of trying to make sure that all these funds
are sustainable. I also just wanted to bring up a couple other additional points.
back in 2020 when we had fsg here and we were kind of looking at raising the rates. That was complemented
by the Monroe County Highway Department stormwater service transportation plan and business strategy.
That goes from 2021 to 2023.
and none of these reports was it brought up that there's a significant overhead cost being paid by highway
or the personnel contributing to the stormwater program. Also you know we have the long-range plan the
last actual update that I had from this plan which I'm always curious we mentioned it here and here
but was about 2017-18 when it said there's about 60 projects within said plan and I would like to kind
of see a list
of how we've been executing these plans. There's also you know the fiduciary responsibility that we
have and I don't want to fear monger but we still have the potential annexation so that could really
dip into the revenue. I know that that
is probably something no one wants to really consider, but we've literally sat at this dais and discussed
improvements off of that road and the bridge, and the discussion is that may be annexed, let's not move
in that direction. I advocated for a long-term engineering approach so we could do incremental improvements,
and if it does, we could pass that plan on. So if people want to discard that possibility, that's fine,
we didn't in the past so I'm not going to do that today. I feel it's my fiduciary responsibility to
make sure that these ongoing discussions are accounted for some of our decision making. Also we talk
about other costs and other things. I can't be a hundred percent but there was a bond ordinance number 2020
Ordinance number 2020 slash 40. A lot of it has identified as highway. I would like to pair into that
a little bit and wonder if those were some of the additional costs like buying the shovels for or the
I'm not going to say it right, but how they plow the snow and they attach the plow to the truck. We
buy all of that equipment unless maybe some of it came out of this bond and but then we
install or hook that up to the stormwater equipment and the fleet crew does go to serve snow removal
purposes and other purposes within the highway department. You know I feel like we do a great job of
trying to balance that. I really wonder like
with the contributions that stormwater does with highway and highway does with stormwater is is there
exorbitant difference where we should be taking on these fixed costs why we've been discussing creating
another long-term plan that's going to take a lot of additional cost also if that annexation does occur
i don't think the workload is going to reduce itself by any means these plans that i just mentioned have
5, 10, 15, 20 year projections. We're not there. And, you know, I understand that this is from the direction
of the Council and I understand that this is a tough decision. I'm not willing to support it today.
I don't want to be involved in creating a quorum where this
could even pass. So I might abruptly leave the meeting. That's how adamantly I want to understand why
we would support this. And then finally, I'll kind of leave it here. In 2016, the budget was sent out to us.
The budget was $1,219,677 that was sent on a Wednesday on the 10th at 1230.
or 8 a.m. We met on Thursdays back then. A new budget was sent at $1,561,607. On Thursday, the next day at 2.51,
we met at 3 o'clock. I literally left my office, walked over here, had that much time to look at the
budget that had a difference of $341,930. And it was an actionable item. And they voted and said, yes.
and it passed. I do not feel comfortable being in this position again. I don't feel comfortable speaking
so freely but I am not in support of doing this without having a presentation of showing us the impacts
because these are rate payer fees and to distribute that is very important and I understand that this
might take away from other services but
I feel like it's one in the same because this will deplete our level ability to complete projects and
provide services as well. It's a very difficult situation. I had to go to my own budget hearing.
I have a dedicated fund. And due to kind of this shortfalls, I may lose personnel in 2027, part-time
personnel. And that's not a comfortable situation. And I would do anything to preserve that. But I might
not be able to have that ability.
totally in sympathetic in the in the difficulty here but I really need to be convinced and again I am
absolutely not prepared to vote on this today and I would ask that we create a special meeting or October
1st the Council said they want to adopt the budget October 14th that gives us enough time if we do have
changes that we can present that they can go ahead and entertain those or we could really look at a
long-term budget plan beginning of 2026 and then our 2027 budget because they're going to be dealing
with reconciling this shortfall for a number of years to come. So thank you.
I am not a fan of the council decision to put Ms Ridge in this situation because the answer is either
we accept this or we pave less roadway. And that's really not reflective of the reality. I don't know.
I understand your concerns, Mr. Enright Randolph. I understand your concerns. But I also know that there
is a great deal that's done utilizing both groups of MVH funded highway stormwater. They have vastly
improved the longevity of our roadways.
And at the same time, by utilizing stormwater crews. And at the same time, provided stormwater with
much needed equipment and or personnel. I don't know that it's that meshing of tasks has already happened.
The question is, what does that
look like in a budget. And yes, there is a stormwater fee. MVH is the tax collected by the state and
then distributed based on the number of miles of roadway in each county. Two different pots of money.
But the efficiency has been in utilizing these crews together and making significant changes and
and limiting the cost to taxpayers as a result. I don't want to stop that from happening. And so if
we become fixated on this is stormwater, this is MVH, we lose some of that synergy that has brought
great improvement across the county to our infrastructure.
but I do understand the point. We can hear this in October, right? And we'll still make all of our deadlines,
correct? Okay. Is that true? Yeah. Okay. So I would ask the surveyor to please be very specific about
the budgetary information he is seeking so that on October 1st, we don't hear, oh, but I didn't,
But that doesn't answer my question. We need to make sure that you're really clear with staff about
what specifically it is that you want. Because I imagine if you dig down and look at each person's daily
budgeting of time, you could be in the weeds so quick, and you're not going to get an answer.
And I think that's what's going to happen, honestly. Because I don't know how you say,
I spent two and a half hours here, and I spent an hour and a half here, and part of that was stormwater,
and all of that was stormwater, but some of this was MVH. How do you do that? I just don't know how
those numbers can be provided in a way that answers your question. I'm not denying the sincerity of
your question. I'm not denying the importance of your question. I'm just saying I just don't know that
it's possible
to drill down to that level to give you the answers that you need. And if the decision is, well,
I guess we just don't do paving, then I will be happy to forward phone calls to the surveyor's office
because we get those. So I'm happy to delay this until October 1st, but I just ask for real clarity
about the budget information that you want, not right here right now, but just please email staff as
quickly as you can so they can prepare. That's all I'm asking for because I don't want to come back
in October to open this up again and have the same thing happen. I don't want to see services cut back
in any area that's provided by the county. That's a tough one. Also,
I'm not in the position where I'm actually looking at all these budgets in its totality and how they're
effective. I serve on this board so it kind of brings a narrow focus so I don't have the luxury
of understanding how to disperse these funds where they benefit each
other individual fund that is kind of underneath the Commissioner's umbrella and underneath the direction
of Director Ridge. Really what I'm looking for and we can talk more is kind of what you mentioned of
how some of these costs are there, what that dollar amount is, maybe try to figure out how much time
is spent with the crew
at highway and just trying to do a cost analysis, but we don't have to get super granular. Some of it
can be kind of more kind of high level takeaways, but you know, that's what I really want to see and
I want to make sure that those percentage are appropriately put into that budget. And yes, I'll work with you,
give you more that would
work send me maybe some information I'll have follow-up questions in this and we can get it all sorted
out and you know we can bring this question forward but also I feel like a lot should be presented to
me based off of the fact that you know I serve on the board and I really have to look at the budget
and make sure that whatever we're doing we don't end up in another situation where
Um, we have to reduce services, um, due to, uh, fixed personnel costs. So I'm not looking for anything
super granular, but just, you know, things that kind of support what was presented today and also a
couple breakdowns of how that contribution stormwater gives and kind of more of a, you know, um, general, uh,
calculation.
It doesn't have to be hour to hour, minute to minute, but I just need something to compare. I also favor
postponing this until October 1st for the reasons my colleagues have suggested, especially since that
discussion would still be timely. We also will take public comment on that. Is there anyone who wants
to offer public comment here?
Is there anyone who wants to offer public comment online? I'm going to continue this item, the stormwater
budget update to the meeting of October 1st. Second. All of those in favor of continuing the stormwater
budget update to October 1st, say aye. Aye. This matter is continued.
I was wondering, I'm sorry, it's a little out of order, but I just wanted to make sure that legal did
look at it and there is no issues with potentially shifting some of these salaries over into stormwater.
I think that's, we never, I got lost into kind of being somewhat prepared. I think to the extent the
highway personnel are doing stormwater,
activities that it can be because the ordinance says it has to be exclusively for stormwater purposes.
One additional comment is I have a non-reverting dedicated fund and all the part-time comes out of that
and I'm very rigid on what they can and can't do to make sure that they're following those statutes and
It's just, it makes it very tough to kind of split salaries and then make sure that, you know,
they're not over focused on one end of the other. But I don't wish that on anyone, but that's how my
entire office is made up. And I really hope that there's a path forward that can bring the relief that
we're looking for. Thank you. Thank you both.
I would like to move on to the next agenda item, which our staff reports. And we have one, the Stipp
Road Project update. Yes. So as you are aware, we have the Morris Creek Road, Stipp Road project.
Morris Creek Road is complete. The first half of it, the total project is complete. So now we've moved
on to Stipp Road and the Lake Monroe water levels were
a bit too high because of all the spring rains we had, so they have finally dropped low enough.
We have our kickoff meeting on Friday, and then the contractor is set to start next week on Stipp Road.
So that'll be very exciting to get that underway and done before the end of the year.
And then I have one more item. We did hire a new stormwater technician, and he is here with us today.
Ross Carlson started with us last week, and he's right in the swing of things. He brings a wealth of
knowledge about conservation, waterways. Yeah, he's a great addition to the team. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome.
the luxury of meeting him at one of the Indiana Lakes Management Society. And it was like my first one.
And I was like, ah, dah, dah, dah. They're like way more in the scientific side of things,
which is a bit over my head. But I do want to say he was very welcoming and actually kind of made me
feel like I've been there attending for multiple years. And I think he's going to be a great addition
to the stormwater team. Wonderful. Glad to see you're already here making waves.
Any other comments or questions from my colleagues? I really want to figure out how we can help make
sure that we're compensating for our portion. I mean, it matters a lot to me. We're in a tough time,
so I just wanted to express that again since I had a lot to say. Mr. Thomas, any comments or questions?
Thank you.
All right, then I believe we can adjourn. The date of our next meeting is October 1st, 2025.